Lexie Hurford, the first woman elected to lead the state’s peak timber body, died on Wednesday morning after a short illness, aged 86, with the industry she served for more than six decades in mourning. Maree McCaskill, chief executive of Timber NSW, shared the news with members and sent the association’s sincere condolences to her husband, Rob, and to her children, Andrew, Sue, Beth, Judy, and Kate, as well as to her sister, Kay.
“She is a legend of our industry,” McCaskill said of a woman whose story ran from the ashes of the family’s burnt-out Lismore sawmill to the presidency of an association that had gone 92 years without electing a woman. Eldest of her five children, Andrew Hurford now serves as President of Timber NSW, the same body his mother led under its old Forest Products Association name.
Her election in February 1999, after four years as vice president, made the Sydney papers under the headline “She logged, she sawed, and she conquered”, years after the press first crowned her the official voice of the NSW timber industry. Asked about the milestone, she observed that men brought great focus to the industry, but women were more likely to consider alternatives, and that having both would yield better results.
“I always just looked at her as my boss,” Colin Dorber, the association’s executive director during her presidency, said in a tribute on Wednesday, remembering a leader who never made gender the point. Dorber had called her talented, hardworking, and honest when she was elected, and 27 years on, he counts himself honoured to have known her.
Born Lexie Ann Berry at Bangalow Hospital on 14 July 1940, she grew up on Bay Street in Byron Bay, where her father, Clive, taught Morse code. Her mother, Rhyllis, had trained as a children’s nurse, and home was a street of three houses with a dance floor across the road and most of the family within a short walk.
Marriage carried her into timber, with the 19-year-old wedding to Rob Hurford at St Andrew’s Anglican Church in Lismore, April 1960, into the family Jim and Olive Hurford had been building in the town since 1932 and sawmilling since 1948. She counted herself “lucky to marry into a family like Rob’s”, where Olive ran the administration and the money at a time when most married women were not allowed to work.
Fire took the family’s South Lismore sawmill on 6 September 1979, at the height of the Terania Creek protests, and although arson was suspected, no one was ever convicted of lighting it. The family grew so stretched through the rebuild that when her washing machine broke down, Lexie hung the sheets on the line and hosed them clean, working at the business until 3 am and still rising to get five children off to school.
“When I leave this industry, it will be on my terms, not someone else’s,” Rob vowed as the couple chose to rebuild rather than walk away, negotiating a sizeable loan on little more than a good name. By 1980, the $2 million recovery had drawn Lexie and her sister-in-law, Lynn, into paid roles, and the devoted mother who had run the household now helped run the mill.
Terania Creek had split the Northern Rivers between timber families and the region’s new alternative lifestylers, and Hurford went looking for the overlap, helping to form the Richmond Valley Reforestation Society so both camps could work on the one thing they shared: a desire for more forest. Customers from the protest camps had walked into the shop and bought hardwood for their own houses, and she reasoned that a movement which “also needed the wooden building materials” could find common ground with the people who sawed them.
Her committee life had begun at a Lismore preschool, where the fundraising mothers read the constitution, found nothing keeping them off the management committee the fathers ran, and voted themselves on and the men out at the next AGM. That single afternoon taught her that a constitution could be read, tested, and changed, and she spent five decades proving the lesson would travel.
“It didn’t bother me that I was the only woman there,” she recalled in From the Ground Up, the family history recorded through 2025, of committee rooms where she was routinely the first and often the only woman. Hurford liked to say that the further you sailed into a river, the more you could see to either side, and she ran every meeting by the sailor’s rule, listening until she had something worth saying.
Committee by committee, she made the rareness ordinary, chairing the Northern Rivers Regional Development Board from 1995 to 2003, sitting on the council behind the state’s regional forest agreements, and leading trade delegations to China, keeping two vases as quiet souvenirs of how far a Byron Bay girl had come. Timber NSW credits her with shaping forestry policy at the state and national levels, her advice sought by governments, industry bodies, and research organisations alike.
Survival in the mid-1990s meant reinvention, with the Northern Forests Agreement halving the State Forest area available to the region’s mills and the family resolving to enter the global market with high-end, unique timber products, a pivot Lexie anchored with a 20-year wood supply agreement submission. Supply to the family’s mills fell 40 per cent when the national parks were declared in 1996, and she told the papers they were “prepared to accept that cut in return for long-term security”.
“This family should be bursting with pride,” then-NSW Premier Bob Carr told more than 250 guests at the June 1998 opening of the Hurford Hardwood drymill at Tuncester, calling new investment in a wonderful local industry the proud achievement of one outstanding local family. The opening came with a $260,000 cheque presented to Lexie herself, part of a $1 million redevelopment package that created 20 new jobs in a town that had watched her mill burn.
The business she helped rebuild now runs sawmills from Casino to Kempsey and north into Queensland, with more than one million plantation trees in the ground, and the wood supply agreements she fought for are the contracts her son presses the Premier to renew. Hurfords today stretches to warehouses in five states and operations in France, the United States, and New Zealand, an arc that began behind the family house on Barrow Lane and left her proud of what she achieved “as a wife, mother and business owner”.
Hurford raised five children through all of it, and after a childhood accident left her daughter Sue with a lifelong disability, she became a quiet force for the cause, driving four purpose-built homes for adults with disability at Ballina in 2018, where Sue made her home. Neither she nor Rob ever fully retired, with Lexie chairing the Northern NSW Plantation Committee and planting their own 40 hectares at Cawoongla in 2003 and then 800 at Warrazambil, hardwood on a cycle she put at 28 to 35 years from planting to the saw.
Away from the mills, the Hurfords sailed, surviving six days trapped off Moreton Bay in 1965 aboard Classic, the timber yacht Rob and his brother Norm had built beside the mill in North Lismore. Word that they were safe travelled through three men from the Murwillumbah sawmill whose hats appeared over a wave, and decades later, the couple cruised the Solomon Islands for three months aboard Rattle ‘n’ Hum, the 15-metre cruiser they built and raced to a division win from Brisbane.
“Mum was always the shoe,” her daughter Beth remembered of Monopoly games at the Ballina beach house that ran on for days, in a childhood of character birthday cakes, hand-sewn dresses, Christmas puddings hung from the verandah on a broomstick, and fish for tea caught on her hand line. Between them, the children remember Bungawalbin campfires and damper with golden syrup, treehouses in the camphor laurels, and a home where the neighbourhood kids were always welcome, with Judy calling the Anglican faith her mother raised her in the greatest inheritance she could have given.
Timber NSW presented Hurford with its award for more than 45 years of outstanding and dedicated service to the NSW forest industry at a Sydney ceremony in November, sharing a week in the city with her daughter, Kate, and the trophy, cut from hardwood and bearing her name. She leaves the industry its first female presidency after 92 years of men, a family still at the head of Timber NSW, and a 66-year marriage to Rob, the sawmiller who rebuilt beside her.
